For about two decades many historians have been making the “material turn”. That is, they have been incorporating physical objects more often and more effectively into their explanations and thereby building up a sub-field of the historical discipline entitled “material culture.” This lecture joins that conversation by investigating some different material realities that are today known to us only by textual representations. The lecture will draw upon different kinds of texts—poems and histories, for example—to ask what these texts actually say and how we might understand their words. The lecture proceeds from the assumption that the objects described did really exist and that texts give us access to those objects even if their reality for us now can be no more that “virtual.” The kinds of descriptions that the lecture includes are to be sharply differentiated from the classical genre of ekphrasis which artfully described things that existed in poetic but not in physical reality.